He was already a great developer when he started Rollup, but writing it brought him to a new level.
Rollup is super clever: most bundlers back then would treat JS modules like giant strings and concatenate them. It was just plain string concatenation, similar to require.js's "define()", so you needed a runtimes that answered to "require()". Modules were assembled during runtime. [1]
Rollup, instead, uses an algorithm to transform the AST of multiple modules into a single AST, inlining all modules and turning them into variables [2], and renaming duplicate identifiers. The final code looks like something that a human would do if asked to put everything in a single file. [3]
This is done by manipulating the AST returned by the Acorn parser, something he seems to have become an expert on.
I'm pretty sure that it was during the development of Rollup that he had other ideas for crazy optimizations, but unable to apply them to a Bundler, he created Svelte.
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[1] https://requirejs.org/docs/api.html#deffunc
[2] https://github.com/rollup/rollup/blob/1e1a11107dbee11636dcf9... and https://github.com/rollup/rollup/blob/1e1a11107dbee11636dcf9...
[3] https://risanb.com/posts/bundling-your-javascript-library-wi...
If you look at the Svelte repo, the project didn't appear overnight. The first commit dates to 2016, and since then there have been many contributers. Don't think Harris solely built the project to where it's been. He's had help.
Lots of under-recognised talent is eveywhere.
- track people and systematically destroy privacy forever
- trick kids into clicks via what should be illegal recommendation algorithms
- use their insanely talented minds to work in advertising
Need more diversity in tech. This should be encouraged vs gulping down the big fat framework FB tells you to
In a field that goes hand-in-hand with programming, which includes pretty much every artistic one, it shouldn't be all that surprising that people know how to use/are at least curious enough to learn the tools available to them.
There are Lisps that are almost universally seen to be great. There are absolutely terrible Lisps as well.